The Republican candidate for president resolutely opposes a constellation of women's issues, from abortion rights to workplace equality. So how did it come to pass that so many women play key roles in his life and his campaign

Senator John McCain has just finished speaking at a packed town hall meeting—one so abruptly, improbably jammed that a few of the many journalists locked out are watching on C-SPAN. The longtime dark horse has rapidly emerged out of the snows of New Hampshire as the Republicans' man of destiny in the 2008 presidential campaign. Perched in the balcony, the cameraman offers an aerial view of a sight most of us have seen only at ground level: McCain, 72, his gleaming white hair a pinpoint in a sea of the subdued shades of New England overcoats, moving jerkily through the crowd, apparently propelled by some occult force as his frequent stops to sign an autograph or pose for a picture are interrupted by the tug of an unseen hand.

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A close-up reveals the poltergeist at work by McCain's side: Brooke Buchanan. The 5'4" Buchanan doesn't look like a hard-ass; a trim and petite brunette in expensive jeans and Tory Burch flats, she stands out from those she is largely in charge of: the press, for whom good grooming on the campaign trail usually means, simply, clean. The first time I met her, she was hustling us onto McCain's renowned campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express. On that blustery fall day, she was wearing a gorgeous white wool coat. Thinking of the grungy days ahead, full of dirty snow, low-pressure hotel showers, and lots of coffee, I told her, "You're never going to keep that clean." She smiled: "Watch me."

After they leave the hall, Buchanan's work is far from over. Throughout the primaries and beyond, she has been McCain's day-to-day scheduler, adviser, spokeswoman, secretary, and sometime bodyguard. She has combed his hair, kept him from drinking caffeine after mid-afternoon ("Just a small cup, Brooke?" McCain would wheedle. "No."), and kept him on track while he runs through calls to donors and supporters. Journalists who have been subjected to her firm responses and directions are not surprised to learn that she worked for the government in post-invasion Iraq.

On the bus alongside Buchanan, McCain hears regularly from Carly Fiorina . Not long ago, Fiorina, as the CEO of computer power-house Hewlett Packard and overseer of its contentious high-stakes merger with Compaq, was one of the world's most powerful female executives. After a rocky departure from the business world, she has reemerged as a Republican fundraiser and an economic adviser to McCain. Recently, people had been asking her if she'd agree to the vice presidency. When I inquired whether she was on the short list, she said only that it included women, and that whatever choice McCain made would be based "solely on abilities and experience." Fiorina has dealt with sexism both casual and cruel, but she doesn't see it in McCain: "I've just never doubted" his lack of gender bias, she contends. Was I there, she asks me, when McCain visited Gee's Bend, the tiny Alabama hamlet famous for its quilters, all women, who sell their works at $5,000 a pop? " They sang to him," she says blissfully.

A few times a week, McCain also talks to Meg Whitman, whose first job since heading eBay has been cochairing his campaign. Back in his Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, Jill Hazelbaker runs his press shop. Campaign fundraiser Susan Nelson plies her trade. And lobbyist Judy Black, cochair of Women for McCain, has joked that her group is somewhat redundant.

McCain jokes about missing many things during his long, harrowing captivity as a U.S. Navy flier held in North Vietnam from 1967 to 1973, including the moon landing and Woodstock. He also missed most of the modern feminist movement—not that he hasn't had plenty of time to catch up. But especially hailing as he does from the peacock masculinity of military culture, McCain has become a most surprising ally for many women in politics, mentoring those in his office and gaining a reputation as a courteous and never condescending colleague. And, the presence of McCain's longtime adviser and coauthor, Mark Salter, and a gaggle of macho insiders and K Street lobbyists notwithstanding, women hold leadership positions in McCain's campaign with plenty of authority, if relatively little fanfare.

McCain's progressiveness in his dealings with women contrasts sharply with his stance on women's issues. He is strongly, vocally anti-abortion and anti-sex education, and he stayed out campaigning rather than attend a senatorial vote on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act last April, which would have overturned the Supreme Court ruling that employees have six months from the date of discrimination—not the date they learned of the discrimination—to sue their employers for equal pay. Under a McCain administration, women might well also see the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a steep decline in the availability of birth control and—due to the proven failure of the "abstinence-only" sex education he favors and his support for parental-consent restrictions on underage abortions—a rise in teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and, of course, illegal abortions. He is at odds with the modern women's movement on every policy point that various advocacy groups care to track, consistently receiving, for example, a damning zero rating, or close to it, from NARAL/Pro-Choice America for his Senate votes.

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I've traveled with McCain for months, squeezed uncomfortably into bus cabins, talking with him not just about Iraq, immigration, torture, taxes, the environment, and all the rest but also about favorite books (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and TV shows, the nature of pride, the Great Depression, and the Korean War. But he is visibly uncomfortable talking about social issues and, when pressed, tends to veer between conservatism-in-a-can ("I agree that marriage, as [a] uniquely important institution, should be protected") and a kind of jokey admission that he is reciting talking points, his voice taking on a sarcastic tone as he adds, "And every home should display the flag, and every mother should cook apple pie once a week." When we arrive at the next destination just as he finishes his answer to one such policy query of mine, he says with a wink, "Just in time."

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When McCain defends himself against charges of being politically anti-woman, his language is curiously flat, as though the discussion were about legalese and not about the lives governed by it. "I am all in favor of pay equity for women," he's said of the Ledbetter act, but "this kind of legislation...opens us up to lawsuits, for all kinds of problems.... This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system."

Usually, having lots of women in one's life is a cure for this sort of myopia. It's McCain's peculiar fate to be surrounded by women—heiresses, CEOs, hard-charging junior staffers without spouses or children—who've been curiously immune to the curse of sexism. He is great for the women he knows; then there are all those other women out there—the ones who might not be able to get birth control, and, perhaps even more to the point, those whose background and income haven't given them the means to combat inequality.

Cindy McCain is a powerful, willful force in her husband's life. Aside from serving as chair of her family's business—one of the country's largest beer distributors—she's the one who reportedly called bullshit on her husband's chaotic, money-burning campaign when it appeared to be doomed in the summer of 2007, helping to force the departure of key advisers and downsizing the whole operation so it could survive until all of McCain's opponents fell from the stratosphere, one by one: Giuliani, Romney, Huckabee. She also travels to exotic if impoverished areas around the world, doing hands-on charity work; she met, fell in love with, and arranged the adoption of their youngest daughter, now a teenager, on one of her many trips to help provide medical care for the poor.

Like many a laconic, work-hard, play-hard CEO, Cindy can be hard to talk to—at least if you're with the press. She sometimes sits in the back of the Straight Talk Express next to her -husband, punctuating long stretches of smiling blandly with bouts of distracted fidgeting with her BlackBerry. Occasionally—really, only occasion-ally—she will enter into conversation, usually about her sons, who are in the military. Jimmy, her youngest son, is a Marine who recently served in Iraq. She would say that was why she was on her BlackBerry all the time—constantly monitoring news about him.

Cindy's stand-offishness with the media is in sharp contrast to John's congenial accessibility, though it intuitively makes more sense. For a politician, McCain's garrulous, recorder-battery-killing openness is unusual to the point of being dangerous for his career. For a politician's wife, on the other hand, silence—and carefully curated comments—are a lifeline. I asked Cindy once what she thought the media had gotten wrong about her family. It was a stupid question. Her husband has been strongly criticized for losing his temper on occasion, and much has been made of his infidelity to his loyal first wife, while Cindy, for her part, has been pilloried as a Stepford Wife pill-popper (innuendo wrapped around a kernel of truth—she beat a publicly admitted addiction to prescription painkillers in the early 1990s). So I asked again, but amended: Maybe there's something trivial you'd like to correct?

She looked me in the eye and said, "To be honest with you, I don't read a lot of it." I don't believe her. Or, rather, I know she must read enough of it to hate us all. John McCain reads a lot of his own coverage, and he can't like all of it. But for him, the back-and-forth of charge and countercharge is invigorating. He looks at confrontations over policy, especially, as a challenge and will instigate them himself if you don't ask first. Cindy, by contrast, keeps her distance, often literally. At campaign events and during the semisocial moments in between, she stays far from the press. The way I remember her most vividly is in sunglasses, talking in low tones with a small knot of young women that included her personal aide and maybe some friends of her daughter's. This self-imposed exile was vaguely adolescent; in her slim-fitting leather jacket and shades, all she lacked was a cigarette.

There's something poignant about her determined distance from the rest of the freewheeling operation. To the extent that one can have fun on a presidential campaign, most of McCain's staff—and the candidate himself—seem determined to have it, whether abusing reporters' expense accounts, perpetuating running inside jokes, or remembering birthdays.

Of course, that may be part of the problem. McCain's press secretary has probably seen more of him in the past year than his wife has. There are reporters who have logged wife-level hours of conversation with him. I asked Cindy once what she thought her husband admired about her—not liked about her, but admired about her. "I know, because he's told me," she said. "He admires my strength and energy in raising our kids, alone a lot of the time."

Meghan McCain has a sort of aggressive coolness about her, as if she were a celebrity in training—which, in a way, she is. She does not seem so much destined for the White House, however, as for the premiere of some film starring one of the lesser Lohans. She wears artfully applied, if somewhat dramatic, makeup and stomped through the New Hampshire slush and beyond in ridiculous high heels. She motors around in an enormous black Lincoln Navigator. She has a film crew following her much of the time.

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They film Meghan for her blog, McCainblogette.com, a mish-mash of photo diaries, mild campaign anecdotes, and self-consciously ambitious MP3 playlists. The project was her idea and is funded entirely by family money; no one's donations have gone to support her contest for politically themed tattoos.

In theory, her blog shows the world another side of her father and, maybe, makes a few more young people at least notice that the candidate has a secondhand familiarity with Vampire Weekend. But between cataloging campaign events and writing things such as, "Last night, my Dad officially became the Republican presumptive nominee for president of the United States!" Meghan's blog turns out to be much like that of any twentysomething; her hard, Prada-encased shell has a supremely mushy center. She is determined to prove that her father should be president. Having voted for John Kerry in 2004, she is eager to persuade anyone and everyone that her dad isn't as conservative as he appears. She wrote in March that she had an "out-of-body experience" watching him address the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, contemplating how "my father if elected is going to change the world for the better and lead our country into a brighter future. I wish everyone could have heard his speech in person because, even though I have heard him give speeches a million times, I was almost moved to the point of tears this morning. Dad, I am so proud of you."

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Meghan is, unsurprisingly, coddled by McCain's staff. At any given event, if she's standing, she'll be asked where she wants to sit. If she's sitting, she'll be asked if she wants to move. This attention seems to make her mildly uncomfortable, but then again, she has a jokey name tag that reads CANDIDATE'S DAUGHTER with a star. Her eagerness and pro-Dad enthusiasm and, perhaps, the fact that she's been on a yearlong road trip, make it difficult to remember that Meghan is actually the oldest of the four children between John and Cindy. While she's had internships at Saturday Night Live and Newsweek—their home in Sedona, Arizona, has a framed copy of an article she wrote—she is in no hurry to choose a career.

McCain has obvious affection for Meghan. In interviews, he talks up her blog and credits her with introducing him to music beyond ABBA (his favorite band). For her part, Cindy says that Meghan represents the "artistic" side of the family, a designation that comes primarily from Meghan's college major, art history. This used to come up during the campaign, when the introductions of the candidate would begin with Cindy, who would mention—to great applause—the service of Jimmy and Jack McCain. Then McCain would take the stage and announce that his daughter was in the room, too—she "just graduated from Columbia University." Then he'd flip open his cell phone: "That's a picture of her and me at graduation. It's a $150,000 screen saver!" Laughter. Then, "Anyone have a job for an art history major?"

If you're looking to decipher where John McCain is coming from, as opposed to where he's going, the McCain you really need to reckon with, however, is his mother. Roberta McCain is tiny, one of those women who seem to fall in on themselves a bit as they get older. Yet her presence is enormous. She projects considerable charisma and has had an outsize impact on her son's life—and, by extension, American political life. She is the Rosetta stone of John McCain's psyche and the living, breathing explanation for all the contradictions that confound those who watch him work with women while working against women's interests and causes.

Roberta, now 96, was a wealthy (yes, her too), independent-minded 20-year-old college student when she married John's father, raising John with his brother and sister while Dad commanded a submarine in World War II. Fielding questions about the length of the Iraq war, McCain often falls back on an anecdote about that time. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he says, his dad said goodbye, got in a car, and left: "I rarely saw him again." As a navy admiral, McCain père was not much more involved in his sons' lives after the war. Roberta was a de facto single mother, and John has all of the genteel quirks of a strong male personality raised by a strong female one; he is both flirtatious and respectful, comfortable in what they used to call "mixed company," if more cautious about throwing around the occasional swear word.

Roberta is headstrong and independent but self-deprecating—a combination she seems to have passed to her son. She bought a car in France when she was refused a rental because of her advanced age. At this year's White House Correspondents' -Association dinner, she had to be argued out of walking to the venue from her nearby home. She reads two newspapers a day and is as up on politics as anyone else traveling with McCain—perhaps too much so. Just before the bitterly fought Republican primaries (yeah, they were!), John and Roberta appeared on Hardball, where she swerved well wide of the family-centric talking points. She took a swing at Mitt Romney's résumé-building item about saving the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, saying that "as far as the Salt Lake City thing, he's a Mormon. And the...Mormons of Salt Lake City had caused that scandal. And to clean that up...again, it's not even a subject." When McCain tried to intervene, Roberta huffed, "Well, that's my view. And you asked me."

When she was younger, Roberta used to go to Capitol Hill to watch legislative hearings; today, she watches on C-SPAN and enjoys button-holing various members of the press to ask them what they think about what's in the news. I think this frightens the campaign. Once, she took my arm for a little support on the way to a hotel conference room. "Are you coming in?" she asked. I told her I was headed to the press filing center. Her eyes lit up. "Oh? And where is that?" We had actually stopped just in front of it. I pointed, and she left my arm and started walking toward it as the babble of journalists leaked out the open door. She got a few steps and muttered, "How interesting...." before a McCain staffer threw himself in front of her: crisis averted.

Had she been born a little later, is it possible that she would have been the first McCain to hold court on a Straight Talk Express? Her candor and strong, informed opinions make it easy to imagine. McCain agrees. "In a different age, she probably would have" been a politician, he says. Even once his father returned from overseas duty and was appointed the Navy's Congressional liaison, "my Dad really didn't really like politics," he recalls. It was Roberta who got excited by what she calls "a good fight."

"Well, honey, if we were coming home and there was a light on"—the lights are traditionally kept on at the Capitol dome if Congress is in session—"we'd go right to the Capitol, because we knew there'd be a fight. In those days, you could go straight up to the Capitol—you could leave your car outside if you wanted to. We'd be at a party, and you came home at nine or 10 or even 12 at night, and you saw the light on—bang-o! You didn't go to bed, you went to the Capitol."

The image of young Roberta McCain, dolled up in her Dior New Look–era finest, trotting up the marble steps in kitten heels to listen to Alger Hiss deny being a Communist conjures thoughts of the kind of whip-smart and saucy, stylish, and resilient icons that women still look up to today: Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy. I find myself thinking that I'd have wanted to be her friend. Then again, we would have argued a lot. "Oh, I was anti-Communist," she says today. "Of course, I'm conservative." Look no further for the equation that reconciles John McCain's politics with his personal and working relationships with women. Roberta was a movement conservative before William F. Buckley produced the inaugural issue of The National Review, and long before Phyllis Schafly began crisscrossing the nation, making a career out of being a scourge to women who sought the right to make a career of their own. Roberta's God-and-country Republicanism is what makes up John McCain's political id. It's not that he doesn't appreciate women and the challenges they face in the world—it's just that, like Martin Luther, here he stands; he can do no other.

The question is whether, despite his obvious and gallant charms, the women of America will bring themselves to stand with him this November. In private, aides admit that McCain's chances for the presidency may fall into a widening gender gap. Their hopes are pinned on the Ann Taylor–suited shoulders of security moms who may vote for him because of his tough national-defense stance and despite his domestic social policies. What's more, they argue that those social policies are not what motivate blue-collar voters: "Many women just don't have the luxury of voting one issue, like you do, on abortion," Fiorina once said to me. If it sounds far-fetched, remember that McCain and his campaign have been underestimated before—just think back to a year ago, when the political press was ready to pronounce the McCain campaign clinically dead. Before all these women, who are truly capable of astounding things, pulled together to make it work. And before Brooke Buchanan confounded me by keeping that white wool coat as pristine as the January snows of New Hampshire.